Ender's Shadow

Starred review from October 4, 1999
You can't step into the same river twice, but Card has gracefully dipped twice into the same inkwell--once for Ender's Game and again for this stand-alone "parallel novel." The course readers will follow this time is of the superhuman child Bean. Raised on streets ruled by starving children's gangs, he was too weak, at age four, to hold peanuts in his hand, but ingenious enough to trick the other children into civilizing themselves--and to keep himself alive. When his genius and uncanny understanding of individuals' motivations are discovered, he is sent to Battle School, where children learn to command fleets for the war with the alien Buggers--the smallest kid ever to do so. Bean is not as perfect as Ender Wiggin--hero of the Ender Quartet, begun with Ender's Game and concluded with Children of the Mind--but he becomes Ender's ally. Though Bean is cold at first, the kind of child who weighs the costs of hugging the nun who saved him from the streets, he wants to understand the respect and love that Ender wields. Thus, Bean's story is twofold: he learns to be a soldier, and to be human. Devotees of the Ender saga will delight in the revelations about the formation of Ender's Dragon army and about the last of Ender's games. Though newcomers to the series may miss many of the novel's points, the wonders of Battle School and flashsuits and children's armies should keep them turning pages. As always, everyone will be struck by the power of Card's children, always more and less than human, perfect yet struggling, tragic yet hopeful, wondrous and strange.

May 15, 1999
This new book from leading sf writer Card is not a sequel to the best-selling Ender's Game, and it's not a prequel either. It's being touted as a "parallel" novel. Having already told the story of Ender, the boy wonder who saves humanity, Card here tells the story of Bean, Ender's sidekick and fellow student at the Battle School.

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 1999
Card's exploration of the origins and evolution of ethics continues in a story that parallels that of his classic "Ender's Game" (1984). As a child, Bean, this book's protagonist, displays astonishing precociousness in surviving on the mean streets of a future Rotterdam, organizing children's gangs until he is endangered by his original leader, Achilles. Sister Carlotta, a nun recruiting children for the International Fleet's Battle School, sends Bean aloft and then continues to explore the whys and wherefores of his precociousness. It turns out that Bean's aptitudes are the results of an illegal experiment in genetic engineering of which he is the sole survivor. Meanwhile, his gifts keep him alive and advancing at the orbital Battle School, where he meets and becomes an insightful ally of Ender Wiggin. Card handles the group dynamics of the Battle School with his usual deftness, and his seasoned fans will be happy to reencounter Colonel Graff, head of the most unusual military school to be found in sf and one of Card's best supporting characters. Eventually, Bean is one of Ender's chosen command team in the book's final battle against the Buggers, and by then, Sister Carlotta (another well-realized secondary character) has found Bean's biological family. Card's complement to his great success demonstrates that a tale can be absorbingly told twice, especially when it is told the second time from a different perspective by an author so grown in range and skill since the first telling. ((Reviewed July 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)